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About this lesson

After we’ve traced the sketch in black and white we can start thinking about what colors we want to use.

Quick reference

Thinking in Color

After we’ve traced the sketch in black and white we can start thinking about what colors we want to use.

When to use

While color schemes play an important role in a design, it's important not to introduce them too early in the process. In most cases it is always better to focus on a composition in black and white so that you don't become distracted or bogged down by color. This goes for logos, but also for other types of designs and illustration as well.

Instructions

  • Open the Thinking in Color Exercise.ai file
  • Once you've opened the Illustrator document, check to make sure that each of the three 'pass' layers are unlocked.
  • Grab your Selection Tool (V) and click on the outline from the First Pass layer, then hold down the Shift Key and select the outline for one of the ears.
  • We now want to select all of the lines that share the same line weight as these two lines.
  • Go to the Select Menu and choose Same > Stroke Weight
  • Once all of the lines sharing the same line weight have been selected, go to the Stroke Panel to the right side of the interface.
  • From here, change the weight of these lines from 1pt to 2pts and then save your work.
  • Once you have saved your work we can go to a Web Browser and visit color.adobe.com where we will begin our search for color palettes.
  • Under the 'Color Rule' dropdown menu, notice some of the different options you have such as Monochromatic and Triad.
  • You can move some of the sliders on the color wheel around and see the other colors update automatically. 
  • Below each of these colors you will also see the color values such as the hexadecimal value and web colors.
  • To decrease the saturation of your colors you can move the sliders towards the middle, and to make the colors more saturated you can keep the sliders all the way to the outside of the color wheel.
  • Another option you have is to go to the 'Explore' tab from the top navigation bar and search user generated themes.
  • You can also type in a keyword such as 'heat' and see all of the themes that have that keyword as part of the name.
  • When you find some color palettes that you like, you can either jot down the color values, or take a screenshot by pressing Command/Ctrl + Shift + 4 on your keyboard, and then clicking and dragging around the area you would like to capture. Normally these screenshots will be saved directly to your desktop.

Hints & tips

  • Adobe Color CC is a very helpful tool for finding color schemes that work. I tend to take screenshots of the ones that I like, but you can also save them or write down the color values for each of the colors that you would like to use.
  • Under the Create tab with the main color wheel, you can also save any theme you come up with to your profile, but you must first be registered with Adobe.

 

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  • 00:05 So now that we have our sketch and we've made some adjustment to the lines here.
  • 00:08 There's one more thing that I wanna do really quickly before we move on to
  • 00:11 the next step.
  • 00:12 And that is I'm just going to select some of these lighter lines.
  • 00:15 Because when I zoom out, I think these lines are looking a little bit light.
  • 00:19 So I'm going to select this first line on the outside here.
  • 00:22 Hold down the Shift key and then click on, going to be the line from one of the ears.
  • 00:26 And then a quick way to get every line that has the same weight or
  • 00:29 shares the same weight as that previous line is to come up to the select Menu and
  • 00:33 choose Same, Fill & Stroke.
  • 00:36 Now, once I do that it's going to select all the other lines
  • 00:39 in this illustration that have the same weight.
  • 00:42 So from there, I can come over to the stroke panel.
  • 00:44 And right here where it says weight, I'm going to click on this arrow and
  • 00:47 just change it to two, okay?
  • 00:49 And that's just going to make all of those lines a bit bolder.
  • 00:53 So from this point, I can go ahead and hit Save.
  • 00:56 And we now wanna begin thinking about color.
  • 00:59 So while there are many ways that you can develop good color palettes,
  • 01:02 whether you're using your own photos, gathering inspiration from books.
  • 01:06 One tool that I like to use and I find very handy is Adobe Color CC.
  • 01:11 It also is a tool that I use pretty frequently for a lot of my projects.
  • 01:15 And it's a great way to kind of start thinking about color.
  • 01:19 Now, you can move things around in real time and
  • 01:21 experiment with different color palettes.
  • 01:24 And the nice thing about it is that there are a few different ways that you can
  • 01:27 kinda group these colors.
  • 01:28 If you wanna go with more of a monochromatic color scheme,
  • 01:31 you just check off monochromatic here, and as you move these sliders around,
  • 01:35 you'll see everything kind of updating together as one.
  • 01:40 Now, there's a few other options here, so just try them.
  • 01:43 Which is just what it sounds like,
  • 01:44 it's three colors that are all kind of equal distance apart from one another.
  • 01:49 And you can actually get some pretty cool color schemes this way too
  • 01:52 just by messing around with the saturation as you move it in closer to the middle.
  • 01:56 And more saturated as you come to the outside.
  • 01:59 Now, you also have complimentary colors which are going to be the opposites on
  • 02:02 the color wheel.
  • 02:04 And you can kinda control these in the same way by making less saturated colors,
  • 02:09 the closer to the center that you get and more saturated the further away.
  • 02:14 So again,
  • 02:14 this is another way you can kinda generate some different color schemes.
  • 02:19 And it's a good way to kind of just get ideas flowing and
  • 02:21 thinking about what these might look like if they're applied to our illustration.
  • 02:26 Now, some of these options are a little bit more wacky and
  • 02:30 I'm not quite sure how it figures these out.
  • 02:32 But if you have a specific color that you wanna try,
  • 02:36 you can also input the RGB values or the hexadecimal values, down here.
  • 02:41 So for example,
  • 02:42 if I just put in a gray color like this, it will update automatically.
  • 02:47 So once you have some color schemes here that you're happy with,
  • 02:50 you know you can get the color values for all of these colors.
  • 02:53 But there's also another way to explore different themes.
  • 02:57 And that is just by coming up here to the Explore tab.
  • 03:00 And you'll be able to see all of these different kind of user color schemes that
  • 03:03 people have come up with.
  • 03:04 And there's a lot of great ones here too, that you can start looking at and
  • 03:08 picking about.
  • 03:09 But the nice thing about these themes is that you can come in here and
  • 03:13 you can type in keyword such as heat, like what I've typed in here.
  • 03:18 And I'm guessing that it's going to give us a lot of very kind of Summer colors and
  • 03:23 just warm color palettes and things like that.
  • 03:26 Which are great, especially for things like sports,
  • 03:31 when you're thinking about warm colors and mascot logos.
  • 03:35 Of course, some are cool also, but you get a pretty good mix.
  • 03:39 And you can try to type in some keywords here.
  • 03:42 And sometimes it will actually just be the name of
  • 03:45 whatever that color palette is called.
  • 03:47 Maybe that will contain the keyword that you typed in.
  • 03:49 So there's a couple of different ways that you can kind of look at
  • 03:54 some of these different color palettes and
  • 03:56 think about how these might look once they are applied to your illustration.

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